Word: raj
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Night. A train bearing more modest English visitors, Adela Quested and Mrs. Moore, chuffs and hoots across the plains. They are on their way to visit the latter's son in Chandrapore, where he serves the British raj as city magistrate. Adela, plain but secretly a spirited young woman, contemplates marrying him. But in her berth she dreams vaguely of adventure, of discovering what she likes to call "the real India." Outside, the real India broods enigmatically, and we see the train from another of the subcontinent's perspectives, as a tiny toy almost lost at its feet...
...singular complexity, Jewel is diligently faithful to its source, the late Paul Scott's magisterial four-volume novel known as the Raj Quartet. Like E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, Scott's story circles around charges of rape and the trials, both personal and legal, that ensue. Like Forster, Scott asks how Britain, in some ways the smallest of small worlds, managed to govern India, one of the hugest and most heterogeneous of countries. But Scott's book is set about two decades later than Forster's, in the final five years of British...
Connoisseurs of tales of the raj will recognize in Jewel most of the pukka props that have become the stuff of imperial legend: rusty colonels and their horsy daughters, schoolmarmy missionaries and pip-pipping young officers. Awful duffers are forever bashing off for a gin-and-tonic at the club, while social gaffers natter on about their rotten luck. India seems, on the surface at least, to be the ultimate British public school, an extended expatriate cocktail party...
...humble genius of Jewel to look beyond this surface and settle on silences, interstices, uneasy moments between engagements. Forswearing the familiar group portrait of the raj in formal poses, it presents snapshots of disoriented individuals, alone and often at loose ends...
...what was all encompassing on the page would have been all confusing on the screen. To the rescue came two other former soldiers from the raj, Scriptwriter Ken Taylor and Sir Denis Forman, the chairman of Granada and the project's prime mover. Their no-nonsense solution was to chop up yard-length segments of wallpaper, pin them on the walls of a large room and sort out a chronological story line by writing an outline of events on each square. In the process, they preserved nearly all the equivocal situations and ragged-edged characters that are often more...